Golden AK's Ashley

This project has been my favourite project so far because of the progress I have made as a Modeller and Lighting Artist and the technical problems that I have encounted along the way. I have also enjoyed working with the people in my group and I am supprised how we managed to stay professional even though the odds were against us finishing our project.

During the begining of the project we all decided to go a dark horror genre for our enviroment which was different to everybody else's. I think we gave ourselves a huge task by creating a simular mansion to the one in Resident Evil and by including 3 extra rooms. As a group we were very passionate about the idea which gave us the belief that we could deliver this project to a high quality.

As a group we collected alot of visual research from films, games and places such as the
Dennis Sever House. There was no point in the project where I felt that I was running out of ideas or had a problem visualising what our enviroment would look like. After our research, we began to put together some concept images.

The breif stated that we needed to include some animation that interacts with the enviroment. Our main interactive pice of animation is the book case opening in the study section of the mansion. Later on, Jared helped us with the story to our animation by suggesting that we could animate the camera as if it were a zombie walking through the mansion. This was a great idea as it meant that we could play with the audiencees preception of the main character. Once we had the story plotted out, we swiftly moved on to the storyboarding and started to model objects and rooms in the mansion. The modelling process started slowly and gradually picked up pace towards the middle of the term. We were gradually seeing the mansion coming together and we had a strong belief that nothing could go wrong.

Two of of us began to UV Map and texture parts of the mansion while the other finished off the modelling. At this piont in the the project, the work load from the modelling was taking affect on us as we were begining to feel tired and exhausted. After texturing 4 objects myself, I new we had an up hill battle with this part of the production pipeline. Our models looked fantastic, but were a pain to texture as some models had curls, swirls and intricate detail. This did not phase us as a group and we carried on texturing. We ran into problems such as the textures stretching or not showing up. If one of us found something hard to do, we would get someone else in the group to do it if they knew how. Time was of the essence with our texturing as most groups were lighting their scenes and test rendering on Vanguard. We felt the pressure on us, but if that was not bad enough, Maya started to CRASH!

This was one of the most lowest points in the project for us as none of us could open or navigate through Maya with out it crashing. We couldn't even finish our texturing because Maya would not let us Render single frames. There were some positives things at this point in the project like Stewart learing how to render fog and myself learning how to render glass. The project was all over... until we came up with an idea to seperate the rooms from each other.

IT WORKED!

Whilst we were desperatly trying to finish our texturing, Stewart animated the camera.

During the penalterment week we lit the mansion and put in the fog effects which brought our textures and bump mapping to life. It was at this point in the project where our mansion looked realistic and finished. We had some trouble with the shadows not rendering out properly but I managed to correct them and give them lush and realistic look.

After we finished the lighting, we needed to render desperatly as we only had 2 days till the deadline. We succesfully managed to batch render the Study, Corridor and Basement which only left us with the Main Room. The Main Room was an absoloute living Nightmare to render. We were luckily given an extension for the project. My team mebers were setting up jobs for the Render Farm but they were all failing due to the fact that they didn't set it up properly. I asked Tom from Team Authentic to teach me how to use the Render Farm and he did a really good job and practically saved our whole project. Now that I was only one in the group who could use the Render Farm properly I used the oppotunity to render as much footage as I could of the Main Room and left it over night.

The next day we realised that the Render Farm skipped some frames so we batch rendered the missing frames whilst Spencer edited the footage we already.

Jared came into the room just as I had finished burning our project on DVD. We were the last group to finish but it was worth it from the results of our film.

If I were to do this project again I would go for the same style but just sticking to 1 or 2 rooms instead of 4.

In the end I think that it was our passion and determination as a group that helped us to finish this project. Even with the low points that we had during this project, we never once fell out with each other. We just got on with the work because we knew what needed to be done.

WE DID THE IMPOSSIBLE AND LIVED TO TELL THE TALE!

Ashley (recovering lol)